contained herein was a very nice post stating where we are on the update for 5.4

Unfortunately it was lost when I lost network connection just as I was shifting from the quick reply box to the preview screen (which has more editing controls.

We are not currently ready, we haven't seen any signs of Virtual Realm testing on PTR, we haven't gotten any info from Blizzard, We have some info from high test addon developers who have data mined the PTR code.
(But while it is helpful it does come with the caveat that nearly every build changes the code.)

IT has been confirmed that 5.4 will break our CensusPlus data collection.. in that the key NAME field has been modified to sometimes include the realm.
Name can show up as Name-Realm.

If we can't get any testing until 5.4 really goes live Metalbeast will have to Stop allowing processing of uploads until we get good code and test runs.

I have finished an update for testing tonight on PTR that might actually process the data into the Servers section of the Censusplus.lua data file... but I'm still working on how to process the multiple realms at one time for the TimesPlus section where we track player counts and class activity times.. for the activity graphs.

Unfortunately since we can no longer assume that any results of /who queries have to come from a known realm.. character processing will be longer per character as we have to walk the whole local data table for each character found.. sigh

But on the other hand, depending on how many realms per Virtual realm end up existing.. we will gain time not having to log in and out of multiple realms.

I've built a table that learns the Virtual realm membership each time CensusPlus runs.. and I will be reporting that info at the end of each run.

Hmm.. 390MB downloaded of apparently 600MB for the first patch pre-load.

So if they decide to do nothing and roll back all the changes that they have placed into PTR to support this feature.. we are fine.. no sweat.

If they decide they have enough info to go ahead and fully implement this .. then we can't allow current version CensusPlus data to be input into the database here at Warcraftrealms.com

If they decide they don't have enough data yet to pick the realms (which is I think most likely the issue) but don't want to revert back out the changes from PTR then the output from /who queries will still be wrong for current CensusPlus and who knows what the data might look like.

Currently they are treating other realms as if they were Connected realms (at least for our purposes) but the signaling info to flag this is all wrong.

At this point, I'm thinking they will try to have the code in place to support Connected realms with 5.4 release, but not actually turn on that feature. Then when they decide which realms should be connected they can flip the software switches for the realms selected and those realms become Connected. That probably can be done without even needing a hot fix.. just a normal realm restart on the realms involved.

Unfortunately this might mean they only test on the feature on PTR (which isn't really setup to test Connect realms) for a very short time just to check for fatal flaws then turn it off) and go live. We might not be lucky enough to actual test under valid (for us) test conditions.. sigh

The structural changes needed for the new and improved CensusPlus are in place.
While some tweaks need to be made to actual have data that make sense (minor detail) still need to take place.
And I need to modify the final census run reporting including at least one added Option switch to disable the reporting if not wanted... things look good (says the half blind man)

Yes the last test cycle blew up.. but it do so at the point where I had stopped working on changes.. I had expected it to blow up long before that.

Some of the result data doesn't make sense.. but it appears that it is correct.. it is just the fact that the selection of realm names Blizzard is using is bizarre. Since they have realms from US and EU.. some of each regions realms have " US" or " EU" added on to the names.. but others from the two regions don't... Not to mention the lone Korean realm and the Russian realm, both of which would blow up WarcraftRealms database since it isn't setup for those character sets.

One of the odd things we are going to be seeing in the future is the following:

Character Bob who was created on realm Alpha
Realms in Connected realm Alpha, Baker, Charlie, Delta

Each realm has created on it a guild called Guild

Bob could join and leave Guild four times and never be in the same guild.

We could see for the same character
Bob-Alpha in Guild-Alpha
Bob-Alpha in Guild-Baker
Bob-Alpha in Guild-Charlie
Bob-Alpha in Guild-Delta

If you happen to also have a character created on Alpha you would see Bob (no realm) in Guild-realm

What I'm a little afraid of is you might see Bob in Guild

This last could lead to confusion at least it has for me.. but after more thought I just decided that it wasn't my problem.. I'm fluffing it off on Metalbeast (it is a back end problem for Guild Progression and Guild Info web pages.)

Latest info I've seen about the rollout was in an interview on MMO-C the other day:

Quote:

Any idea how soon we will see the first group of Connected Realms and any rough idea of how quickly the feature will be rolled out after that?
Pretty quickly. I would reference the Cross-Realm Zones feature as being something similar, as all of the technology was in the patch that we released it with. We started doing the Cross-Realm Zones not long after that patch came out. All the technology for Connected Realms is in Patch 5.4 and we definitely plan to start connecting the realms pretty quickly and rolling it out as soon as it seems like it works and is stable.

Will Virtual Realms be used to help with faction imbalances on large realms, or just to help out the lower population realms?
For now, it will exclusively be for lower population realms. Obviously any realm that is already queued or close to being queued isn't going to be a realm that we want to merge more servers with. It wouldn't make sense to connect them, as it would create a worse playing experience for everybody. I happen to play on a queued server, and it isn't super fun to sit there for 45 minutes before you get into the game. For now, it will only be targeted towards realms that need more players. In doing so, we certainly will be looking at faction balance, and trying to use the connectedness to balance those as much as we reasonably can.

Suffice to say I'm celebrating that it won't affect my own already overpopulated realm Sounds like it won't happen on patch day but anytime soon afterwards, I'm guessing that all that can be done is turn off processing till it's known how things work; we can all look out for the first examples and produce some sample data from them. I'd guess it'll be US servers that get turned on first; I'm sure us in the EU were at least a week behind on CRZ, if not more, and even then it was rolled out gradually, my server got it another week or so later than the first ones._________________EU-Draenor:
-- Sagart - Tairbh - Balgair - Buinne - Eilnich - Ruire - Dubh - Laidir - Naomh - Falaich --

You may say that now..
When I started Wow back in spring '05 I started on Cenarius a member of the first realms to get turned on.
Off and on for the next 5 years it was a high to medium high population realm with queuing anytime a peak event came around to draw people back in.
You can't imagine my surprise when earlier this year I discovered it had gone to New Player status.. population had dropped that much... however I'm sure there are plenty of inactive accounts on the realm.
It would be interesting to see what Blizzard does if there is a large influx of old players reactivating accounts because they heard something great about a new xpac or something.

I moved to Draenor, two moths ago, and I have yet to experience a login-queue..
Just before raid time, last night, a guildie did, however, report a queue.. There was 10 people in queue before him.._________________Doing census mainly on Draenor; Raluf - Nimsay - Lusmo - Quixx - Sosyan - Garthog - Trubin - Zalistra, Zesmi and Djaang

You clearly don't play on Wednesday evening then (or you get logged in before the crowd appears, it's worst about 8-9pm server time) - even this long after the last patch there's 150-200 queue, every Wednesday night Just wait for 5.4, then you can enjoy 400+ queues EVERY night of the week for at least the next month; it's happened with every patch this expansion, particularly raid patches, and I can't imagine this one will be any different

Also enjoy being unable to do much in the Timeless Isle due to other players everywhere; it'll be a lagfest the first week or so with absolutely everything swarmed by other people, and if the worldbosses are on a long spawn timer the world server will crash when they get engaged (Oondasta killed the server loads of times the first month or so of 5.2). It's playable enough outside of the first month of a major patch, but every patch I curse the high populations, and ponder moving (I never will, I've been on Draenor far too long to want to leave now but I hate how overpopulated it is these days...)_________________EU-Draenor:
-- Sagart - Tairbh - Balgair - Buinne - Eilnich - Ruire - Dubh - Laidir - Naomh - Falaich --

Today was a good day.. or maybe it was a bad day... depends on your point of view. {I run CensusPlus in the background while coding and doing other things.. I picked up less then 1/2 my normal number of updates!}

I worked Padanfain hard.. and made good progress. We got DATA!

The thing to understand is that the PTR is a moving target, you never know what Blizzard will be working on when you log in, and you can't be sure that anything you saw working before will be working today. It is also a unique environment neither fish nor fowl. It seems like every possible way to screw up realm names are picked for use.

For example if you look at the US test realm Anasterian depending on which program call you invoke and also where you are (another US realm or EU realm your realm can be seen as Anasterian, Anasterian (US), or Anasterian (US) {1 or 2 spaces}.

Here is what we found... THEY ARE NOT PREPARED..

If they were to go live tomorrow with what is on the PTR we would have to go to a new version of CensusPlus... if they continue to display non-local realm characters in the /who results.

If the /who results remain as they are now on live we are fine with what we have... until they flip the switch and have Connected realms go live.

It looks like they have the underlying code in place for connected realms.. but none of the characters on the PTR have the data switches enable to allow them to be know as Same Realm, Connected Realm, or Coalesced (aka CRZ) Realm.. which makes testing impossible for now.
But I have code in place in case they turn that on.

The final test run for today effectively in a single run did two realms at the same time without problems.. (it could have been more but only two were in CRZ mode today.)

I even have the class activity data captured, but I still need to finish the code to produce the TimesPlus data lines in the output file. I hope to have a functional run on that tomorrow.

Outstanding is the UI changes I want/need to make and a determination on what to do about Guild processing..
I had hoped to fluff it off on Metalbeast.. but after further thought, the two of us need to decide what is to be done. Since a character on one realm can be a member of a guild of any other Connected realm we don't have a way to cleanly track guild activity (membership, progression etc.) without changes in the file to be uploaded to Warcraftrealms.com or major data processing on the back end to parse the home realm out of the Guild name.

You clearly don't play on Wednesday evening then (or you get logged in before the crowd appears, it's worst about 8-9pm server time) - even this long after the last patch there's 150-200 queue, every Wednesday night Just wait for 5.4, then you can enjoy 400+ queues EVERY night of the week for at least the next month; it's happened with every patch this expansion, particularly raid patches, and I can't imagine this one will be any different

Also enjoy being unable to do much in the Timeless Isle due to other players everywhere; it'll be a lagfest the first week or so with absolutely everything swarmed by other people, and if the worldbosses are on a long spawn timer the world server will crash when they get engaged (Oondasta killed the server loads of times the first month or so of 5.2). It's playable enough outside of the first month of a major patch, but every patch I curse the high populations, and ponder moving (I never will, I've been on Draenor far too long to want to leave now but I hate how overpopulated it is these days...)

The new 5.4 API functions used by the UI (and Addons) to retrieve and work with data from Blizzards servers are in place... too bad that some of the ones we need for CensusPlus don't actually work.. either the back end code to connect the API to the database isn't in place or the data Blizzard needs to add to their databases haven't been finished for the PTR environment.

It is nearly impossible to build and test code against data that isn't there.

Blizzard expanded the number of realms ID'ed in the PTR test area... and some of the realms react as would be expected while others react strangely.

A lucky catch by Padanfain found that /who 90 returned characters from the two realms we have been seeing.. but using /who -z (@ thunderbluff) characters from more then two realms.. and when he tried doing a census run on the added realms.. the results were different from the standard PTR realms (mostly failures) sigh

This is going to force me to do a lot more defensive programming to protect against Blizzards incomplete work.

Before Padanfain could test for me he had to download another 1GB patch how much of that will lead to preload for the rest of us I don't know but I'm hoping in the next day or two the PTR code data miners will have new info for the rest of us addon coders.

Well mostly... Assuming Blizzard doesn't make any surprise changes between now and patch day. CensusPlus is ready to collect data for upload to WarcraftRealms.com. A sample output has been sent to Metalbeast so he has data to work with for his site changes.

There are still a number of changes and updates I need to make for the in game display and function of the addon.

Since Blizzard still hasn't actually linked any of the test realms in Connected configuration I had to play simulation games..
The two main realms in the PTR, one US one EU, are effectively being handled as if they are one realm (in other words connected realms without admitting it.) The other realms in the test environment are coalesced realm (aka CRZ) in that we see the characters in game and if a -z (zone) option is given to the /who query we see them in who results (just like we can now in 5.3.)

When Padanfain does a test census run he gets the data for both the US and EU realms and the program correctly splits the activity data and character data for both realms. So a single run does multiple realms. Since CensusPlus in game is only a snapshot of the current activity, I intend to leave the character data numbers at the connected realm level since that is what you will actually experience in the game. For historical record break out by individual realm we will have to rely on the website, as we do now.

At this time I display the realms caught in the census run at the end of the run in chat and along the top of the main CensusPlus window.

I still need to check out the guild displays and the character display option (the latter is definitely broken at this time.)

Since a character can be a guild member of a guild that is created in any of the Connected realm set, what I have currently in place is that only the census takers home realm guilds are displayed. I intend to have the connected realm names act as switches to allow you to see the guilds of any of the connected realms. I may or may not have that ready by the 10th... but I don't feel lots of stress over this since Blizzard says they won't be ready for connected realms on the 10th either.

On the other hand... Blizzard is still fighting to get their testing finished.
For the MoP testing Blizzard closed testing on me early and I didn't feel prepared.

but now We are Prepared... even if Blizzard isn't.

But I have a secret .. PTR testing was a complete failure.

Here I thought by having Padanfain do testing for me, I could slow him down.. and maybe catch up a little in the census race.... but no luck.. He did more census counts while also doing PTR testing... then he did the previous month.. sigh

If so, what happens, if I install the new version 10/9-13 and run it (same date) on my EU servers, which won't be updated, until 11/9-13?_________________Doing census mainly on Draenor; Raluf - Nimsay - Lusmo - Quixx - Sosyan - Garthog - Trubin - Zalistra, Zesmi and Djaang

Expect NO... Hope Yes...... And no don't bother to even get the new version of CensusPlus until after your regions realms are shutdown for the patch.

One of the reasons I'm delaying the release of CensusPlus until after 5.4 goes live... Is that I have little confidence that what we see working on PTR will be working exactly the same on Live 5.4.

There is code in the PTR that isn't fully implemented, but the shell exists so the addon doesn't barf on unknown code.. (Blizzard instead of returning the correct results just returns a Nil value.)

As late as last night Blizzard was having problems with launching new raid instances.. and the fact that the PTR is still open less then a week before announced launch date does not give confidence but... They made the announcement they have to launch READY OR NOT.

I don't trust Blizzard to have the same code from PTR actually going to live... so I need to test to see if any of their changes/omissions impact CensusPlus.

If Blizzard backs out the Virtual/Connected/{merger} code.. then the addon will Barf on load. The latest Patch 5.4 Patch notes (dated 27-Aug) still indicates the same changes they made to the notes (dated 5-Aug) that
"To make Connected Realm feel seamless, player’s home realms won't be indicated in the game world. In certain places, such as chat, the players' home realms will be displayed next to their name."
Yet I listened to a skype interview of lead developer Cory Stockton on 13-Aug where Cory stated the #tag and other code had to exist or there would be chaos in the game over name confusion. So Blizzard is sending mixed messages.

EU people trying to get a jump on new addon.. it will Barf on load since 5.3 does not know the new API calls. Over the weekend I tried to test the new code on my live account... and the more I tried to work around the code issues the worse things got for me... until I just gave up due to time issues. The code works on PTR.. and I will continue to work on another branch of the code using current live... JUST IN CASE... and I'll use the opportunity to clean up some issues I don't like for use in a future CensusPlus release.

As it is I'm not really happy with the code as we have it now... it works.. but it is UGLY. I've got a next cycle release project going.. that shrinks the addon by almost 25%... there is that much old spaghetti code still hanging on since Rollie picked up the project back 8 years ago. With Padanfain's assistance we were able to test non-specific patch things, that has given me the info and confidence to drop code out of CensusPlus that is no longer needed due to changes made by Blizzard over the years.

If Blizzard were to fully back out on the new API's that impact our ability to handle connected realms... I have a plan in place, and a lot o defensive code already in place. But it will probably take me a day or two to rework the code so that CensusPlus will work in that environment and still provide to Metalbeast the changes he is expecting with 5.4

As stated in the Announcements 5.4 breaks WarcraftRealms.com... and we have to prepare and assume the changes announced will happen.. even if they don't... I've worked hard to limit the changes that Metalbeast has to work with. Every character now has an added data field sent in to WarcraftRealms with the upload. IF Blizzard keeps their word the data is populated.. if not ..I have to fake it {populate the field using assumptions that would be valid for that situation} for the website..

Oh and just as a reminder... between the time Metalbeast stops processing on US patch morning... and I get the new Version of CensusPlus through the release process at Curse.com... NO UPLOADS WILL BE PROCESSED.

It is just a fact of how Blizzard operates, this means for the EU region there will be a short (we hope) time period where Warcraftrealms.com will be processing uploads from US region realms... but won't be processing EU uploads.. (the output of EU census runs will be incorrectly formatted.)